The industrial waterfront of Brooklyn no longer resembled the decaying shipping district it had been just months prior. Behind the heavily reinforced brick walls of Warehouse 7 and its newly acquired adjacent sectors, a massive technological and biological expansion was shifting the global supernatural balance of power. The subterranean foundry levels had been converted into what Maya called The Imperial Vaults—not a place to store hollow stacks of paper currency, but a high-tech fortress of infinite resources, automated science, and sovereign evolution.
The air inside the newly constructed Tier-2 laboratory was intensely crisp, vibrating with the continuous, low-frequency hum of automated liquid nitrogen cooling tanks and advanced cellular replication arrays. The ambient scent of oil and
